The rise in the value of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in recent years has made cryptocurrency mining a lucrative activity. Cryptocurrency mining uses computing power to compete against other computers to solve complex math problems, with that effort rewarded with bits of cryptocurrencies. That computing power helps create a distributed, secure and transparent network ledger — commonly known as a blockchain — on which applications such as bitcoin can be built.
The trick, though, was finding a location where you could put all that cheap power to work. You needed an existing building, because in those days, when bitcoin was trading for just a few dollars, no one could afford to build something new. You needed space for a few hundred high-speed computer servers, and also for the heavy-duty cooling system to keep them from melting down as they churned out the trillions of calculations necessary to mine bitcoin. Above all, you needed a location that could handle a lot of electricity—a quarter of a megawatt, maybe, or even a half a megawatt, enough to light up a couple hundred homes.

On 1 August 2017, a hard fork of bitcoin was created, known as Bitcoin Cash.[103] Bitcoin Cash has a larger block size limit and had an identical blockchain at the time of fork. On 24 October 2017 another hard fork, Bitcoin Gold, was created. Bitcoin Gold changes the proof-of-work algorithm used in mining, as the developers felt that mining had become too specialized.[104]

Bitcoin (BTC) is a cryptocurrency which is regarded as the world’s first decentralized digital currency. It was created by a pseudonymous person or persons named Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009 and has since gone on to become the world’s most popular cryptocurrency by market cap. Bitcoin is a deflationary currency whose issuance is capped at a total supply of 21 million coins. Each Bitcoin can be divided into one million units, with the smallest unit of 0.00000001 known as a satoshi in homage to its creator. The distributed public ledger that Bitcoin uses to record transactions is known as a blockchain and Bitcoin can be spent at over 100,000 online merchants and can also be held as an investment. Bitcoin is traded for fiat and other cryptocurrencies on various exchanges but can also be used to facilitate p2p transactions. Each transaction incurs a small transaction fee to cover the cost of sending Bitcoin over the blockchain ledger, with the fee going to miners tasked with keeping the network secure.
Meanwhile, investors have been rattled this week by reports bank-owned currency trading utility CLS, along with enterprise software giant IBM, are teaming up to trial the blockchain-based Ledger Connect, an application that offers services from different vendors, with some nine financial institutions, including international heavyweights Barclays and Citigroup.
In December, 2013, Techcrunch published an interview with researcher Skye Grey who claimed textual analysis of published writings shows a link between Satoshi and bit-gold creator Nick Szabo. And perhaps most famously, in March 2014, Newsweek ran a cover article claiming that Satoshi is actually an individual named Satoshi Nakamoto – a 64-year-old Japanese-American engineer living in California. The list of suspects is long, and all the individuals deny being Satoshi.
Nakamoto is estimated to have mined one million bitcoins[26] before disappearing in 2010, when he handed the network alert key and control of the code repository over to Gavin Andresen. Andresen later became lead developer at the Bitcoin Foundation.[27][28] Andresen then sought to decentralize control. This left opportunity for controversy to develop over the future development path of bitcoin.[29][28]